M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio: Four years of change, compared

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio arrives four years after the first, equipped with the M1 Ultra. Here's how the latest top-spec model has moved on from the original big-hitter.

The new Mac Studio appeared with a new M5 Ultra chip on Tuesday, making it the top option for anyone working on AI. It marks the fourth Ultra model to be released, over four years after the very first one was introduced.

Back in March 2022, the M1 Ultra model was viewed as a big deal. Thanks to its processing power, it clearly was.

But three model upgrades and four chip generations later, there's a lot of change to consider when it comes to performance.

Here's how the M5 Ultra Mac Studio measures up against the M1 Ultra version that launched the family in 2022.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Specifications

Specifications	M5 Ultra Mac Studio (2026)	M1 Ultra Mac Studio (2022)
Launch starting price	$5,499	$3,999
Dimensions (inches)	7.7 x 7.7 x 3.7	7.7 x 7.7 x 3.7
Weight (pounds)	8.0	7.9
Processor	Apple M5 Ultra, up to 36-core CPU (12 super cores, 24 performance cores)	Apple M1 Ultra, 20-core CPU (16 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores)
AI processing	32-core Neural Engine, GPU Neural Accelerators	32-core Neural Engine
Graphics	Up to 80-core GPU, third-generation ray tracing	Up to 64-core GPU
RAM	96GB, 256GB, 512GB	64GB, 128GB
Memory bandwidth	1.2TB/s	800GB/s
Networking	Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, 10Gb Ethernet	Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, 10Gb Ethernet
Storage	1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 16TB	1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB
Ports	Six Thunderbolt 5, HDMI, 10Gb Ethernet, Two USB-A, SDXC, 3.5mm headphone	Six Thunderbolt 4, HDMI, 10Gb Ethernet, Two USB-A, SDXC, 3.5mm headphone

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Design, Weight, Size

Apple has left the Mac Studio exterior untouched across four years and multiple chips. The compact round-cornered aluminum block of the current edition measures 7.7 inches square and 3.7 inches tall, identical to the 2022 model.

Likewise, there's not much difference when weight is involved. The M1 Ultra is lighter at 7.9 pounds, but the M5 Ultra's extra mass at 8 pounds won't be noticed on your desktop, and probably not when you pick it up either.

The front has stayed consistent, with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports for M1 Ultra or Thunderbolt 5 for M5 Ultra alongside a memory card reader. The only thing that's changed here is the standard those ports run on, as the appearance is certainly identical between generations.

Turning to the back reveals the usual row of ports, along with the large grille section that dominates the rear. That grille is, again, the same size and design in both models.

The raised circular base with vent holes is also unchanged, complete with the same vent holes for cooling. All of your mounts and so forth you have for the M1 Ultra are still usable for the M5 Ultra model.

Obviously, Apple tends to reuse a design that works for multiple iterations. That certainly seems to be the case for the Mac Studio.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Processor and graphics

Beyond AI, which we will get to, the performance gulf here is enormous. Four years and four generations of Apple Silicon separate these two chips.

The M5 Ultra starts with a 30-core CPU, using 10 super cores and 20 performance cores. You can scale this up to 36 cores, with 12 super cores and 24 performance cores.

The M1 Ultra, by contrast, used a 20-core CPU with 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. There was only one CPU configuration, so the M5 Ultra offers far more cores at either tier.

In both cases, Apple combines equivalent Max chips using a high-speed interconnect known as UltraFusion. For the M5 Ultra, Apple joins two dual-die M5 Max chips for a quad-die architecture, a first for the company.

The result is an inter-die bandwidth of a staggering 4.4TB/s. The M1 Ultra's original UltraFusion managed 2.5TB/s, itself still impressive.

On graphics, the M1 Ultra shipped with a 48-core or 64-core GPU, with no hardware ray tracing at all. The M5 Ultra uses a 64-core or 80-core GPU, with added hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

Ray tracing brings more realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections to 3D and design work. It is a capability the M1 Ultra could do, but not with the ease of the hardware-accelerated assistance the M5 Ultra's GPU has.

Apple puts a figure on the rendering gain too. It cites up to 4.7 times faster scene rendering in Maxon Redshift on the M5 Ultra than the M1 Ultra.

This is a large jump where 3D and visual effects artists are concerned.

There are Media Engines at play for both models, for hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding. The M1 Ultra handled H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW, with two video decode engines and four video encode engines, as well as four ProRes encode and decode engines.

The M5 Ultra doesn't really break this pattern too much. Though it does have AV1 decode capabilities.

On memory, the two are a generation apart in capacity. The M1 Ultra had 64GB or 128GB configurations, while the M5 Ultra scales from 96GB to 256GB, and up to 512GB if you could afford it.

There is also a large gap in memory bandwidth. The M5 Ultra moves data at 1.2 terabytes per second, half as fast again as the M1 Ultra's 800 gigabytes per second.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - The bigger AI push

The Mac Studio was always pushed as the performance model by Apple. But for the M5 generation, it's framed around accelerating on-device artificial intelligence.

The key change is the GPU. For the first time, the Ultra chip tier gains Neural Accelerators embedded in each graphics core, purpose-built for the matrix math that drives AI models.

Both models still include a Neural Engine, a 32-core version in each case that doubles the cores of other non-Ultra chips. But the M1 Ultra's Neural Engine works alone, without the great GPU acceleration the M5 Ultra now brings.

Pairing a 32-core Neural Engine with up to 80 GPU cores full of Neural Accelerators gives the M5 Ultra a combination the M1 Ultra could not approach.

Apple claims the M5 Ultra has up to 9.8 times the peak AI compute of the M1 Ultra as a result. That is a vast leap that AI researchers simply cannot ignore.

It quotes the M5 Ultra Mac Studio as being up to 9.8 times faster at large language model prompt processing in LM Studio than the M1 Ultra, and up to 8.2 times faster at text-to-image generation.

Machine learning training shows the widest gap of all. Apple cites up to 15.4 times faster CopyCat ML training in Foundry Nuke on the M5 Ultra compared to the M1 Ultra.

The payoff is the ability to run enormous language models entirely on the machine. Apple frames this as freedom from cloud costs and token limits, with the added privacy of keeping data local.

For an M1 Ultra owner working in AI, that gap is the single most compelling reason to look at the new model. The older machine was never designed with local large language models in mind, but Apple adapted to the market with the 2026 refresh.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Benchmarks

The M5 Ultra is not available for anyone to perform benchmarks on it just yet. But that said, we can pull out some data points based on Apple's claims and another product to have an idea of what to expect.

The most accurate thing we could possibly determine independently of Apple's PR is single-core performance in Geekbench 7.

Since the single-core test relies on the processor using the fastest core available, we can turn to the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5. The Super Cores in it will be the same as in the M5 Ultra, only fewer in number.

The M5 in the MacBook Pro can score 3,637 on the single-core test. Geekbench's results browser shows the M1 Ultra hitting 2,225 for the same test.

The result indicates the M5 Ultra will be noticeably faster than the single-core performance of the M1 Ultra. It's close to double the performance.

While we can be pretty certain about the single-core speeds, we will have to estimate for multi-core and Metal. This means extrapolating from Apple's claims.

For multi-core, Apple says the M5 Ultra delivers up to 1.3 times higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra. We previously determined that to be a score around 50,000.

The M1 Ultra Mac Studio, on the other hand, hits 23,357 in Geekbench's listings. This is a respectable score, but the estimate shows there's been a considerable boost over the years.

For Metal, Apple said the M5 Ultra has 40% faster graphics performance than the M3 Ultra. Based on a Geekbench score of 244,854 for the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, that would turn into something in the region of 350,000 for the M5 Ultra Mac Studio.

The listing for the M1 Ultra Mac Studio on Geekbench doesn't say how many GPU cores it has, but the 153,805 score is probably for the upper-tier 64-core GPU.

Regardless, there is a massive gulf when it comes to graphical performance.

We'll update all of these charts when actual benchmarks are available.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Ports and Connectivity

Despite visual similarities, the physical ports have moved on more than they first appear. The M5 Ultra offers six Thunderbolt 5 ports, with two at the front and four at the back.

The M1 Ultra also had six Thunderbolt ports in the same layout, but they were the slower Thunderbolt 4 standard. Thunderbolt 5 pushes the available bandwidth to 120Gbps in some situations, a real gain for displays and docks.

That said, 40Gbps in Thunderbolt 4 isn't too shabby.

Both share HDMI, a 10Gb Ethernet connection, a pair of USB 3 Type-A ports, and a headphone jack that supports high-impedance headphones. Thunderbolt aside, the rear selection is otherwise very familiar.

On the wireless side, the leap is larger.

The M1 Ultra used Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, which was more than serviceable for the time. Both then and now, if you need fast network access, you'd go for the 10Gb Ethernet connection.

The M5 Ultra moves to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, thanks to a switch to Apple's N1 chip.

That N1 chip also adds Thread networking, which the M1 Ultra never offered. For a smart-home hub or modern wireless setup, the M5 Ultra is far better equipped.

That said, someone who owns a Mac Studio probably has a HomePod mini or an Apple TV 4K for smart home management.

Display support has grown too. The M1 Ultra drove up to five displays, consisting of four 6K 60Hz screens and one 4K 60Hz on HDMI.

Now, the M5 Ultra handles up to eight, meaning up to eight 6K screens at 60Hz, or up to four 8K screens at 60Hz. Or even four 4K screens at 240Hz.

This is an area that's more to do with professional signage and sets for performances, rather than home users. Then again, we are in a device budget range where someone could make an overkill display arrangement at home.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Storage and clustering

Storage sees a genuine architectural upgrade. The M5 Ultra uses a next-generation SSD built on PCIe Gen 6, which Apple says doubles storage speed over the previous Mac Studio generation.

That matters a lot when you're loading large AI models or shifting uncompressed footage around. Faster storage means less of a wait for things to load, after all.

This time around, Apple is leaning into clustering as part of its AI talking points. Using Thunderbolt 5 and remote direct memory access, several modern Macs can pool their memory into one shared resource.

Apple says a cluster of four Mac Studio systems delivers up to three times the AI inference performance of a single machine.

The M1 Ultra had no equivalent clustering story, as the concept was not part of its pitch in 2022. This didn't mean you couldn't do it.

Tools such as Exo and MLX allowed earlier Macs to talk to each other and pool their memory and computer power over Thunderbolt or Ethernet.

You definitely could cluster with an M1 Ultra Mac Studio and other devices. You won't, however, get the same bandwidth and other improvements Apple has introduced to MLX, let alone the AI benefits of those GPU neural accelerators.

For storage capacity, the M5 Ultra also stretches further.

Both start at 1TB and double through the range. The M1 Ultra topped out at 8TB, while the M5 Ultra adds a 16TB tier above that.

However, the few people who go for that top tier of storage will pay a considerable sum to do so, thanks to the memory crisis and Apple's premium upgrade charges.

It's more probable that a corporate buyer will opt for less storage and instead rely on external or network storage devices than pay the high prices.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Price

The M5 Ultra Mac Studio starts at $5,499, with education pricing at $5,099. That is well above the M1 Ultra's $3,999 starting point from 2022.

The original M1 Ultra base included the 20-core CPU, 48-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and 1TB of storage. An upgrade to the 64-core GPU cost $1,000 more, while 128GB of memory was another $800.

Storage upgrades were $400 more to go from 2TB, another $600 again from 2TB to 4TB, and $2,200 on top of that to go from 4TB to 8TB.

Much has changed in the years since, including the current memory market. High-capacity memory upgrades on the M5 Ultra are far more expensive than anything Apple charged for the M1 Ultra.

Going from 96GB to 256GB on the M5 Ultra costs a steep $4,000. The 512GB memory option is not available until October, and is expected to cost considerably more.

Storage upgrades have also climbed. Going from the base 1TB to 2TB is an extra $500. Getting 4TB is $1,500. Going to 4TB to 8TB costs $3500.

If you want the upgrade to 16TB of storage, that's $7500 on its own. At this point, you should consider external Thunderbolt 5 SSD storage which will be very close to as fast as the internal drive for about 60% of the cost.

The Mac Studio has always been expensive, and so have its upgrades. It's just worse right now, and will be for a few years, at least.

M5 Ultra Mac Studio vs M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Which to buy

It's not hard to believe the M5 Ultra Mac Studio has leapt forward in performance since the line came out. Four years of progress and a multi-generational technology jump will make sure of that.

This is not intended as a word processing machine, that's what the Mac mini and iMac are for. This is for heavy lifting, deep, long processing runs. And like Apple says, AI loads.

It's far enough of a jump that the M1 Ultra Mac Studio owner has a very good case to pick up the M5 Ultra version. There's more than a sufficient amount of improvement to justify such a move.

That said, it's also safe to say that Apple's expected customer for the Mac Studio has also changed over the years.

The M1 Ultra arrived as something that can seriously crunch the numbers of any task. It was a creative professional's dream machine. It still is for many, and will remains so for some time.

Apple is pitching the M5 Ultra at a slightly different crowd now. Sure, the performance is there, but the massive potential for machine learning tasks and AI training means the intended audience has shifted considerably.

On the design side of things, Thunderbolt 5 is nice, and improved amounts of storage and monitor connectivity help too, but there's not much externally that's really changed.

To be fair, for the Mac Studio, it's never been about the looks. It's always about the massive processing potential inside that aluminum casing.

The honest summary is simple. If your work is creative and the M1 Ultra still keeps up, there is no rush to upgrade.

But if AI, other other heavy processing lift is central to what you do, the M5 Ultra is a generational leap worth taking.

When we review this machine, we'll be discussing it in context with the actual workflows that we've been using for the last few years, and how much faster they've gotten. We're looking forward to that.

And, if you're coming from a M1 Ultra Mac Studio, and aren't looking at heavy AI lifting, the M5 Max Mac Studio outperforms it in every regard. More on that in a while.

Where to buy Apple's M5 Ultra Mac Studio and M1 Ultra Mac Studio

Apple's M5 Ultra Mac Studio can be ordered now at B&H Photo and Adorama, with prices starting at $5,499. Our M5 Ultra Mac Studio Price Guide provides easy price comparison across popular Apple resellers.

Deals on open-box and pre-owned M1 Ultra Mac Studio configurations can be found on eBay, with prices as low as $2,134.95 at press time.